The practice of stating an artist’s age
alongside his or her achievements, though typical, rarely adds much of
value to a viewer’s understanding of the work—not so with the oeuvre of
Arnold Mesches.
At eighty-six years old, Mesches has been making and exhibiting his art
for over half a century. Though irrelevant to the combined pleasure and
revulsion induced by Mesches’s dark, drippy, at times ghastly, but
nearly always masterful paintings, knowledge of his long-standing
career adds a measure of gravitas to a wonderfully challenging body of
work. In his new exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the
octogenarian reveals himself to be something of a snake charmer;
sinuous blood-red lines and flamelike markings cohere just enough to
form representational images—vast, ornate interiors in the first room
of the gallery and spooky, swamplike landscapes in the next.

Resisting
formal and conceptual categories, Mesches’s overtly passionate
style—rife with opaque narrative symbolism, intricately obsessive
lines, and darkly psychological undertones—could mistakenly be
considered naive or outsider, but by having studied art in the 1940s
and exhibited and taught ever since, Mesches avoids that slippery
designation as well. Most compelling is the images’ idiosyncratically
liminal quality, as when a group of trick-or-treaters—or maybe masked
murderers—hurries past a morass of brilliant red and ocher yellow that
congeals simultaneously into a wall of fire and a harmless block of
autumn trees. A streaky wash of grays and browns threatens to disappear
into the amorphous damp of an elegant swamp before solidifying into
three trees reflected in a lake—a man in colonial uniform, dressed for
revolution, dining alone among them.

The practice of stating an artist’s age
alongside his or her achievements, though typical, rarely adds much of
value to a viewer’s understanding of the work—not so with the oeuvre of
Arnold Mesches.
At eighty-six years old, Mesches has been making and exhibiting his art
for over half a century. Though irrelevant to the combined pleasure and
revulsion induced by Mesches’s dark, drippy, at times ghastly, but
nearly always masterful paintings, knowledge of his long-standing
career adds a measure of gravitas to a wonderfully challenging body of
work. In his new exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the
octogenarian reveals himself to be something of a snake charmer;
sinuous blood-red lines and flamelike markings cohere just enough to
form representational images—vast, ornate interiors in the first room
of the gallery and spooky, swamplike landscapes in the next.

Resisting
formal and conceptual categories, Mesches’s overtly passionate
style—rife with opaque narrative symbolism, intricately obsessive
lines, and darkly psychological undertones—could mistakenly be
considered naive or outsider, but by having studied art in the 1940s
and exhibited and taught ever since, Mesches avoids that slippery
designation as well. Most compelling is the images’ idiosyncratically
liminal quality, as when a group of trick-or-treaters—or maybe masked
murderers—hurries past a morass of brilliant red and ocher yellow that
congeals simultaneously into a wall of fire and a harmless block of
autumn trees. A streaky wash of grays and browns threatens to disappear
into the amorphous damp of an elegant swamp before solidifying into
three trees reflected in a lake—a man in colonial uniform, dressed for
revolution, dining alone among them.